


Unworthy

by Jaelijn



Category: Blake's 7
Genre: Action/Adventure, Adventure, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Season/Series 01, Whump, past-Avon/Anna
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-05
Updated: 2021-03-05
Packaged: 2021-03-19 00:20:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,894
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29866287
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jaelijn/pseuds/Jaelijn
Summary: The first whiff of it closed up his throat, making him swallow hard.He nearly physically recoiled when the plate was put in front of him, with the clear intention that he should eat the contents. Only a tight, desperate grasp for some vestige of manners kept him from moving, but he couldn’t be sure nothing had shown on his face.During a routine diplomatic visit, Avon runs afoul of a local tradition.
Relationships: Kerr Avon & Roj Blake, Kerr Avon & Vila Restal, The Liberator Crew - Relationship
Comments: 6
Kudos: 8





	Unworthy

**Author's Note:**

> Warning: If you have emetophobia or characters throwing up squicks you in any way, please pass over this fic. It's not strictly _about_ throwing up, but it happens. 
> 
> In other notes, this one was inspired by a set of fanzines I acquired that have a particular style of Avon-adventures: Solo-Avon with a dash of whump. I figured I'd try something like it. Hope you enjoy it!

The first whiff of it closed up his throat, making him swallow hard.

He nearly physically recoiled when the plate was put in front of him, with the clear intention that he should eat the contents. Only a tight, desperate grasp for some vestige of manners kept him from moving, but he couldn’t be sure nothing had shown on his face.

The meal didn’t _look_ unappetising, a spiralling, pasta-like construct, artfully arranged on the plate, but the scent!

Blake, damn him, seemed entirely unaffected. He thanked their host with unshakable politeness and Avon watched, horrified, as Blake took up his cutlery.

Avon thought that if he had to watch Blake eat, he would throw up then and there. Already he was holding his breath, and still there was saliva gathering up in his mouth – most certainly not because he was working up an appetite.

“What, exactly, is this delicacy?” he bit out, trying not to gag as the act of speaking brought a fresh wave of the stench to his nostrils.

Their host, the leader of a highly technologically advanced but very traditionally inclined people, did not seem to notice or take offense at Avon’s tone, which couldn’t have been particularly enthusiastic. He answered with the same unwaveringly even tones he had been using throughout their talks. “We call it Dorikatl, the _gift of the gods_. Legend has it that our ancestors, in the Olden Times, used it to weed the unworthy from our ranks.”

Blake, caught by the story, put down his fork to listen. Avon would have breathed a sigh of relief, if, well, he had been able to breathe. His curled his hand into a fist until his nails, even blunted as they were for his work, bit into his skin – the pain, momentarily, distracted him.

“The unworthy?” Blake asked.

“Those unfit to live before our gods,” their host continued. “It is said that Dorikatl smelled vile to them and tasted worse. No unworthy could force themselves to eat it; the test was foolproof. Of course it’s all a legend, and two such exalted persons as yourselves have nothing to worry about. It’s a perfect delicacy, made from the local Dori plant.”

 _Splendid._ Avon tensed to resist the impulse to jump up from his seat to escape the stench. He could say nothing now, of course. Legend or not, these people were _traditional_ , and their legends mattered more than the host – The Exalted Prince, who had shed any name but his title – seemed to care to admit. The fact that the Federation had abandoned their attempts at colonising the planet had told them as much, even if they had had precious little information otherwise. Blake, of course, had thought it perfect – if the Federation wasn’t interested, perhaps the rebellion could gain ground.

And here they were. Avon would have to stay and eat the Dorikatl, or suffer whatever consequence came with being ‘unworthy’. It didn’t sound good.

“What happened to the unworthy?” Blake asked.

The Exalted Prince carefully took up his own cutlery. “Blake, there _are_ no unworthy. It is a legend, that is all. Eat, friends.”

Blake glanced over at Avon then. “Avon, are you worried about your allergies?”

Avon blinked at him, astounded. The stench was making his eyes water, and he thanked the fates for Blake’s perceptiveness on this occasion. He kept himself in his seat for a little longer by sheer willpower. “Yes,” he lied, “we should have our computer analyse a sample. Excuse me.” He stood without waiting any longer, made himself pick up the plate and walked out, thumbing his bracelet as he went. “Vila, bring me up _now_.”

For once, Vila was alert and ready to act without argument. A moment later, Avon was on the _Liberator_ , though of course the smell, like the Dorikatl, had come with him.

“Pugh, what is that stench!” Vila complained the moment the teleport beam released Avon.

Avon smiled grimly – evidently, Vila was also among the ‘unworthy’. He dumped the plate unceremoniously on the console. “Get rid of it. I’m not going back down – when you’ve done it, call Blake, say I’ve had a reaction and am confined to the medical unit.”

“What?” Vila squawked, holding his nose.

“Just do it, Vila.”

Avon hurried out faster than was perhaps dignified, but the stench seemed to follow him all the way to his cabin anyway. It only really faded after he had showered and changed his clothes. When he emerged, he headed to the medical unit, just to make sure that the sensory perception _wasn’t_ some kind of obscure allergic reaction.

He found Vila there, miserably bent over a basin. “What was that stuff, Avon?” he complained when Avon walked in. “I have a delicate stomach, you know.”

“Did you _eat_ it?”

“Eat! What do you take me for? I don’t just put everything into my mouth! I only had it sitting in front of me until I’d finished calling Blake. Thanks a bunch!”

Avon decided to take pity in him. “I’ll clean up here. Go take a shower. It’ll help.”

“If you say so,” Vila grumbled, but did as suggested.

Avon ran a general-purpose scan on himself and found nothing wrong. Perhaps, he thought vaguely, he ought to have kept a sample for analysis, but at the time his only thought had been to be rid of it. That said, had Vila… Avon wouldn’t put it past the thief to leave the plate sitting on the teleport console in his misery.

Avon stepped up to the coms and established a link to the teleport bay. “Cally, are you at the teleport?”

“Yes,” came the prompt reply. “Vila said you had a task for him?”

Either the smell hadn’t lingered, then – or perhaps Cally was ‘worthy’. “I did – I was just wondering whether he left a plate of food behind.”

“I don’t see any plate, Avon. Will Vila be back? He seemed in a rush?”

“Give him time,” Avon said, feeling just a little gracious in his relief. “No matter about the food. Thank you, Cally.” At least, he mused as he turned off the coms, he _hoped_ it wouldn’t matter.

Unfortunately, and Avon really should have known, the Exalted Prince ‘absolutely insisted’ – Blake’s words – that Avon return to the planet for the next stage of their talks, as soon as his ‘medical condition’ allowed it. Apparently, Blake explained, it was a gross breach of tradition if the negotiation partners weren’t all present during the entirety of the proceedings. Avon, who hadn’t considered himself so much a negotiation partner than an unwilling entourage to Blake because the man had been foolish enough to suggest he go alone, didn’t know what he could possibly have contributed to the talks now that he was out of them, but the Exalted Prince was as much a stickler about tradition as the people he governed.

Naturally, that meant he had all but threatened to break off their talks unless Avon showed back up.

Though Avon was far from convinced of the usefulness of the planet for Blake’s rebellion – and indeed anyone else – he grudgingly allowed Blake to report that he was better. A scarce four hours since coming up, Avon teleported back down.

On arrival, he was immediately welcomed by one of the blank-faced palace guards who would guide him through the labyrinthine palace to wherever Blake and The Prince where currently having their talks. They had undergone the same procedure on their first arrival – apparently, _tradition_ prohibited their direct teleport, though it would have saved them a lengthy walk through the vast palace, and The Prince some waiting, no doubt.

Practicality, however, did not seem to be a value on this planet, Avon mused darkly as he walked silently alongside the guard. Later, he would wish to have been a little less lost in his thoughts, a little more than usually suspicious.

The hard shove took him completely by surprise, sending him reeling to the side. Then the floor vanished beneath him and Avon found himself falling. He tucked in his head and rolled awkwardly over his shoulder only because Cally hadn’t stopped until she had drilled the reflex into all of them.

Even so, he came to a halt stunned and breathless, the impact with some wall or corner jarringly abrupt.

For a moment, Avon lay gasping on the ground, his back hard up against a wall, trying to catch his bearings – but even if he had been on his feet immediately, he would have been too late to prevent the heavy barred lid slotting in place over the hole in the ceiling through which he had fallen, sealing him in.

Avon came to his feet, stumbling when he found the floor to be unstable. Planting his feet far apart for stability, he reached to push against the bars, which, like the ceiling, were just a little above his head, but some kind of stun baton came down sharply against the bars from somewhere out of sight. It jolted an arc of electricity through the metal and drove Avon back, his demand for an explanation swallowed unsaid. There was no arguing with a response this hostile.

As if he really needed an explanation – apparently, his reaction at dinner had _not_ gone unnoticed, and he was about to find out _why_ there were no unworthy.

With a curse, Avon fumbled for his bracelet – only for the entire space he was in to jerk and jolt sharply, sending him brutally down to his knees. The bracelet, already loose, snapped fully free–

–and crunched worryingly when Avon’s hand came down on it involuntarily.

Even with the light too dim to really make out any details, Avon knew that it had broken – but more concerningly, the room – no, the cage – he was trapped in was moving. The opening above vanished from view, briefly plunging him into total darkness. In the terrifying stillness and utterly sightless, Avon identified the jolting and bobbing of his cage as that of a craft on water.

He had hardly any experience with this type of ship, his experience with bodies of water limited to the half-hearted swimming lessons he’d endured as a child and the bobbing about on pool floats that had been a part of those. Not much experience at all, but enough to be able to tell this type of locomotion from that of a mechanical conveyor.

He stayed on his knees, not trusting his balance in the dark. A water conveyance system? Perhaps it was even a river – it was impossible to tell.

Even as light burst back into the cage, it was limited to a barred view of the open sky through the overhead opening. The walls were made of opaque plating of some kind, curved into the top in a rough egg-like shape, possibly to give the cage buoyancy. Avon wasn’t exactly an expert.

In any event, the cage wasn’t particularly big – Avon could brace himself against both sides simultaneously. He might even be able to make it capsize, but with the bars locked in place above, that would have been a sure death sentence – locked in a cage filling with water – even if there was no more water below him than a shallow canal to transport the cage.

But it seemed the craft was picking up speed, and Avon wasn’t keen on reaching its destination. He stood, balancing carefully. The bracelet was useless, the activation mechanism shattered, and he hadn’t the tools to even attempt to fix it. He did have the small probe that he had begun to carry habitually and his gun – but without knowing what material it was that he was shooting at, Avon didn’t particularly want fire at the walls and risk the ricochet. He might get further with the thin laser beam the probe could emit.

Carefully, Avon tested the bars above by rattling on them with his hand, now that he could be reasonably certain that there was no longer a guard keeping watch to prevent his escape. The bars were sturdy, set into a grid that was fastened down securely by some means out of Avon’s sight. Squinting against the bright sky, he tried to make out a lock and failed – not that he had given himself much of a chance at picking any lock he might find. He was no Vila, and he didn’t exactly feel steady. Grimly, Avon pulled the probe out and set it to a fine beam. The device’s energy supply wasn’t endless, but perhaps it would be enough to weaken the bars sufficiently to bend them aside, even working awkwardly overhead. Provided, of course, that he had enough time before the cage delivered him to his final destination.

He placed the probe against the bars and was immediately punished with a shower of sparking electricity that flung the probe from his hand.

Thankfully, he hadn’t hurt his hand in the process. Avon gathered up the probe before he could accidentally step on it and checked the bars.

There wasn’t even a dent. There was no point in making a second attempt.

Avon went down on his knees and carefully approached a wall, feeling the cage dip a little through his movement, though he seemed to be in a broad channel now – the cage hit neither ground nor walls nor did his shifting from the centre upset its stability overly much.

Aiming the probe at the wall where he hoped to be above water level, Avon cut a small circle. This material yielded to the beam easily enough, but the sight that greeted him when he pushed the cut-out from the wall wasn’t encouraging: He was on a large river, buffeted along by rapid currents. What he could glimpse of the shoreline as the cage was twisted around revealed barren wasteland. Far away – _already so far away!_ – was the palace and the surrounding town, its roofs gleaming in the stark sunlight.

With every moment he watched, it grew farther away, and with it any hope of alerting Blake or contacting the _Liberator._

It took Avon a long time to make an opening large enough to climb through. By then, the currents had taken him down a side arm into quieter waters, though he was still moving steadily downriver. Now, at least, the riverbank seemed to be within reach.

He would have to swim, of course.

Avon stared out of the opening he had made with trepidation. He could keep himself afloat in still bathing pools, in appropriate bathing wear, but a wild river, fully clothed, was a different matter entirely. But without his bracelet, the _Liberator_ would have no way to locate him, even if they realised that he was missing: The Prince would certainly have a story ready for Blake why Avon had not yet arrived, and why he could not be reached on the communicator – and the others would check with Blake first and believe the explanations if Blake did, if they had reason to check on them at all. After all, Blake and he had meant to be involved in delicate negotiations that were sure to take time. If Avon remained gone for long enough, of course, Blake would probably begin an enquiry and search, but Avon had to stay alive and available to be found.

Avon couldn’t stay where he was and he didn’t much fancy his chances at staying, fully exposed, wherever he reached the shore until he was found eventually. His best chance at speeding up the process was making his way back to the town, and he would not be able to do that if he stripped off his shoes or clothes, not under the heavy solar radiation on this planet, exposed to the elements with no means of sheltering.

Reluctantly, Avon compromised in shedding his jacket. It was heavy and the dark, lightweight sweater he had worn underneath was long-sleeved, providing protection from the sun, even if the dark material would draw heat. He transferred all belongings from the jacket to other pockets – not that there was much. Being rid of the jacket was something of a relief – he had been feeling the heat slowly building in the mostly enclosed cage – but after it was done, he had no reason to hesitate any longer.

Avon had no doubt that the craft was meant to take him to his death – an efficient means of disposal of the unworthy: removed from civilisation and left to the wilderness, and that only if nothing more deadly was waiting downstream. He had no choice.

The climb up to the opening he had made instantly upset the craft’s balance, capsizing it and slamming Avon down into the water with an uncontrolled splash. He floundered underwater, desperate to come up for air, and broke the surface with a gasping cough. The cage was ahead of him, bobbing along on some kind of air cushion, but Avon was caught in the same currents, dragging him inexorably along. It was far more powerful than it had seemed. Never a good swimmer, he was dipped under briefly twice more before he managed to catch hold of one of the air cushions that had come loose from the cage and to steer it to the bank.

Avon crawled from the water and promptly collapsed, his lungs heaving in air.

The ground was hard, barren, and stable beneath him, but for a moment it still seemed to be bobbing and weaving. The illusion stopped as Avon shook the water from his hair, pulling himself further from the edge. He was completely drenched and physically drained, every muscle burning, but he couldn’t stay here and wait for the ground under him to become muddy from the water he’d dragged out of the stream. Avon sat up and emptied the water from his boots before checking on his belongings. At least he hadn’t lost anything to his uncoordinated swim.

His cage was long gone – carried off by the stream – and with it any sign of civilisation. As far as he could see on either side of the river in any direction, there was nothing but plain, flat land. The only point of orientation was the direction of the stream – he had been carried downriver, so the place he had come from must be in the opposite direction, even if he could no longer see the town.

The sun was already burning down, rapidly drying him. It wasn’t exactly hot, but once he had dried, it was sure to be uncomfortable.

Shoving his feet back into his shoes Avon stood and began walking.

Even though his life, even on the _Liberator_ , was mostly sedentary – intersperse by running for his life now and the compulsory exercise periods back when he was living on Earth, with his food allowance precisely attuned to his needs, he fell quickly into a rhythm. Walking, it seemed, was something that could become as automatic as breathing, requiring little thought. As time to think wasn’t something he particularly wanted in his current situation, he concentrated on the landscape around him instead.

The wastes weren’t _quite_ a desert. There were struggling trees, especially near the river, and clusters of rock. There were large patches of thorny brush that Avon had no choice but to go through or risk losing sight of the river – his only means of orientation. There was also a type of stark red plant that reminded Avon of Saurian Major and that he did not care to investigate. He knew next to nothing about the flora and fauna of the planet – it might just try to eat him.

But he saw little signs of life otherwise – not just intelligent life; he didn’t spot or hear any larger animals either. On the dry patches of packed dirt, large beetles scuttled away from him footfalls, but he saw no birds, like he had come to expect on most planets that were in any way liveable. This far from the noises of civilisation, if was almost eerily quiet, if it hadn’t been for the river drowning out the sound of Avon’s own breathing.

Perhaps he would have been more curious if he could have teleported out at any moment, but his curiosity was quenched by the slowly building heat, driven by the exertion and the sun, the ache in his muscles from his uncoordinated swim and the fact that he could not catch even a glimpse of the palace in the distance upriver.

The brush snagged and tore at his trousers, painfully scratching his skin and slowing his progress. There was no way to judge the distance he covered, of course – the landscape was far too uniform – but Avon knew that it was likely going to be night before he made his way back, provided no one found him first. As automatic as the walking was, he was growing tired rather more rapidly than he had expected. He imagined that Vila would have complained by now – which at least would have been a distraction. Avon stopped with sigh for just a moment, brushing sweat off his forehead. The sun was in his back by now, but even without squinting against the brightness, the town hadn’t come back in sight. He hadn’t even found the fork in the river yet that had taking him to the sidearm where he had ultimately escaped the cage.

He thought it unlikely that a hostile party would come to check his fate: A little upriver, he had made a grisly find of a cage like his, capsized on the banks – and a corpse rotting trapped inside, bones beginning to bleach in the sun. There had been nothing useful to find there. No, there would be no checks: The ‘unworthy’ were sent out here to be abandoned.

Still, after that, Avon’s nerves were on a wire thin thread. He had little to distract himself, and hunger and thirst were beginning to make themselves felt – he hadn’t been able to catch a bite on the _Liberator_ earlier and he hadn’t exactly enjoyed swallowing the river water. With corpses rotting inside it, he was reluctant to sample any more of it. His gun, at least, was still functional.

Night came quickly, the sun disappearing rather more rapidly behind the horizon than Avon had expected, the encroaching darkness terrifyingly absolute. He found improvised shelter amongst some rocks, hidden from all sides. It was hardly comfortably, but he hadn’t thought to research the fauna – there had seemed no need, after all he hadn’t planned on going hiking. It was just possible that it was active at night, better equipped than Avon was for the darkness but equally as hungry.

With the sun gone, there was no light. The sky was clear and the starscape was impressive, but the planet had no moon to reflect sunlight and give some illumination to the night. Avon might have been able to continue on a little in the light of his probe – until its energy finally ran out, at any rate – but it didn’t seem worth the risk. He couldn’t chance straying too far from the river, or he would be hopelessly lost. Or worse – he might miss a turn and fall _into_ the river, where, exhausted and blind, he would surely drown.

So Avon huddled uncomfortably between the rocks, exhaustion and darkness battering at him, shivering as the temperatures dropped in the absence of sunlight. He had drawn the gun, clasping it tightly, feeling ridiculous for finding comfort in it when he couldn’t see and was hardly likely to be able to hit whatever came up to him. Still, he ought to stay awake – at least until he was sure there were no nightly predators – but fatigue was dragging at his eyelids, enhanced by the never changing rush of the river.

But he needn’t have worried about staying awake. As the temperature dropped, the stench began to rise.

At first, Avon believed it to be a figment of his overtired imagination – the stink of the damning meal haunting him – but it soon became all too evident that it was real. One of the plants, Avon assumed, that released its pollen at night, probably triggered by the lower temperatures or by the lack of light. Whatever the explanation – soon, any thought of sleep was driven out by the fight against nausea.

Without escape, the stench was slowly but surely making him physically ill, and all his concentration went into keeping himself from a panicked, futile flight into the darkness. If he ran, he would surely drown. Avon buried his face hopelessly in his shoulder, sniffing at wet fabric and his own sweat – which helped, at least for a little while – before the stench began to overpower all else. By the morning, Avon felt drenched in it and he had lost the fight against his clenching stomach more often than he cared to count.

Prolonged exposure seemed to have done nothing to lessen the impact of the stench on him, and though he welcomed the lessening, heartily, he knew that the stench’s return the following night would be all the worse. By the end of the night, the stench had pressed on him, and no amount of bile had been able to dispel it.

As he rested back against the rock, trembling and exhausted, more tired than he’d been after a day of walking, he was slowly finding himself capable of thinking again. Dehydration was going to be a serious concern. Though any thought of eating was well and truly gone, he was very weak and very thirsty, the gun long abandoned in its holster. He had no medical supplies, of course, to combat the nausea or the deaden his sense of smell, but to continue as he had planned was out of the question. He hadn’t wanted to drink from the river, but he had no choice now – without water, there would be no chance at all, no matter how impure the water was.

He almost fell at the bank, which at least wasn’t particularly steep, or he may have tumbled into the stream after all. After washing out his mouth, splashing his face and drinking deeply from his cupped hands, Avon felt slightly more alive. The water hadn’t tasted anything like anything but differently from what he was used to on the _Liberator_ , but of course that was no indication of its cleanliness. It sat heavily in his empty stomach.

He didn’t know whether he could last through another night like the last.

Avon suspected that he had discovered, to his chagrin, why none of the unworthy returned to the town, even if any of them had managed to survive the journey down the river, like he had. But then his imprisonment had been nearly spontaneous – he imagined that any ordinary unworthy would first be stripped of all possessions before being sentenced to this exile – or sent into death. The Dori plants, whichever of the few plants he had seen they were, formed an effective, inconspicuous barrier that wouldn’t matter to those who could not perceive the scent – but would drive away anyone who could.

If Avon had known how far the Dori fields extended downriver, even he may have been tempted to turn around, even knowing that his only hope of rescue lay with the town. But he couldn’t risk turning around and finding himself in a worse situation further away from any search party. Assuming, of course, that there _was_ a search.

Avon didn’t think Blake would abandon him – he had proved that it was against his nature – but The Exalted Prince was clearly shrewd. He could send Blake off on a wild goose chase and even with all the effort, Avon would be no closer to being located. Without his bracelet he was, of course, just one lifesign among millions.

There was a strange rash on his legs where he had scratched himself on the brush – he had no idea whether it was simply skin irritation or something else, but it was a waste of time to worry about it. If the thorny brush was made up of Dori plants – well, whether or not it was, there was nothing he could do about it. He was wasting daylight.

Sheer willpower brought him back to his feet. He would have to try and stopper his nose for the night, though he had little hope that it would work. He may even come to harm, breathing it in heavily through his mouth – but he had little choice. He couldn’t endure it.

With the laser probe, he cut of a strip of cloth from his shirt for nose plugs for later use, made sure that his gun was safely connected to the power pack, and set off again. He was determined to cover as much ground as he could before nightfall, and hope for the best.

He was stiff, but walking soon eased him into a rhythm in which his mind wandered. Having exhausted all musings about his situation, he thoughts travelled down paths he didn’t want to dwell on – what the hell he was still doing on the _Liberator_ , and his reasons for staying – the need for the ship to pay back the single largest debt he owed, the fact had Blake would never agree. The sound of Anna’s voice. Irritated with himself, Avon brushed the memory away and focussed instead on mentally rewiring the teleport console, though he was tired and numb and kept losing his place.

He didn’t make it – couldn’t. By sunset, the palace and town were back in sight, but still far off, a good third day’s walk. After the riverbend, the stream had become rapid, covering large distances in a short space of time. If Avon had been in the cage for some hours, on foot the distance stretched interminably. Surely the _Liberator_ had figured out that he was missing by now, but no one had made any sign of trying to contact him.

But of course they couldn’t.

Avon stumbled to a halt, liking chapped lips and doing little to moisten them. He hadn’t dared taking another drink from the river – the current too rapid, the bank too steep. Of course the _Liberator_ hadn’t contacted him; he didn’t have a bracelet anymore – but evidently his mind was slipping, too. 

Avon was well aware that he was nearing the limits of his strength. He was exhausted down to his bones from lack of sleep and a full day of walking. His stomach had forgotten its discomfort and had begun to complain loudly about the lack of food, bringing its own kind of nausea. He was thirsty again. He was moving slowly.

He was dreading the night.

He had begun hoping, wildly, that one of the others would materialise in front of him at any moment with a teleport bracelet – if they thought to search outside of the city, surely a lonely figure walking by the river couldn’t be too difficult to find? But it was foolish to hope for outside salvation, a sign of his deteriorating body. He had to keep walking, and he forced his leaden legs to move.

 _Walking_ , Avon thought wryly, granting that he was being generous. _Stumbling_ was probably more accurate by this point. He had thought that the sun would be his biggest enemy – he was sure he was sunburned, but the coolness of the evening brought no relief. He could already smell faint whiffs of Dori, the sun beginning to dip lower and casting long shadows. The air was cooling rapidly, and there was no shelter in sight.

Avon was reluctant to stay too close to any of the plants, but there were no rock formations along this stretch of river, so he settled for camping at the foot of a tree, between two crooked roots jutting from the ground. There was no thought of staying awake to fend of predators – with any luck, the nose plugs would work so far as to let him sleep through the worst of it. Avon stoppered his nose and curled onto his side. He fell into an exhausted sleep before the stench could really rise.

It woke him.

The irrepressible impulse to throw up forced him to unblock his nose or choke, which of course made things much worse. Avon huddled on his side, shuddering with nausea and fatigue, and wished for it to end. When it did, after interminable hours of darkness, Avon found himself too weak to get to his feet. His muscles were tense with overexertion, but his bones felt liquid, barely enough to support his bodily integrity.

He _knew_ he had to move. A part of him was screaming that it was his only chance, that he was _dying_ , that unless he got closer to the city, this planet would be the end of him, that he didn’t want to _die_ – but he barely had enough energy to roll away from his own sick. Walking was out of the question.

Hopelessly, he drew his gun with shaking hands and fired twice into the air, knowing full well that the _Liberator_ weapon was a far cry from a flare gun, in particular in this sunlight – but if the _Liberator_ was monitoring, perhaps, just perhaps…

With the stench receding in the daylight, the need to rest, to sleep became overwhelming. Avon drifted off in jerking snatches, catching disorientating glimpses of the sky, of the ground when he flicked his eyes open for moments at the time before exhaustion pulled him back under. He almost welcomed the unconsciousness, the rest, the absence of thought – but when he woke to lengthening shadows, it was to a feeling of pure dread.

He wouldn’t survive this for long, and he hadn’t moved any closer to possible salvation. He hadn’t even managed to replenish the water he’d lost. He closed his hand feeble around his gun. If only his signal would have done something, anything…

His last thought, before he succumbed to darkness, was that there was someone calling his name – _her_ name died unspoken on his lips.

He hadn’t expected to wake up again at all. He certainly hadn’t expected to wake up to the fresh, clean scent of the _Liberator_ ’s recycled air.

Every nerve in his body felt scraped raw, the smallest of smells of what he knew was the medical unit seemed overpowering. He ached all over, but at least there was not even a hint of Dori.

The thought that he was _alive_ trickled through his mind like syrup.

A slight turn of his arm alerted him to an IV cuff – probably for fluid and nutrients – and there was the sound of regular breathing outside of his own.

Avon dragged heavy eyelids open to blink up at the ceiling, but his eyes resisted his efforts to keep them open and slid shut again almost immediately.

Perhaps he was drugged, then, too.

His mind was clearing, but his didn’t feel capable of much movement. For a moment, he was afraid that it was yet another dying hallucination – but no, the relative scentlessness was too visceral not to be real.

“Avon? Can you hear me?”

Vila – of course. Blake would have been a fool to send him down to the planet, so the thief would be easily spared on watching the infirm – him. Idly, he wondered just how close he had been to dying down there – if, indeed, they were still there. As a base for the rebellion, the planet clearly was far less suited than even Avon had assumed.

Avon wet his lips in an attempt to speak, managed little more than a puff of air.

“Here.” Vila placed something against his lips – something solid that was cool, tasteless, slightly gelatinous and, once Avon parted his lips to accept it, burst into wetness – hydration cubes. Avon let it dissolve into his tongue.

“Thanks,” he managed when it was gone.

Then the darkness carried him away again in its embrace.

He felt much better when he woke up again. He knew where he was, who he was. His muscles seemed to be back under his control, and when he opened his eyes, they remained open. He was still damnably weak, barely inclined to stir from where he rested on his side, but he was less conscious of every sensory input.

Vila was still – again? – in the chair by the bed, leaning forward eagerly. “Hello! Back with us?” he chimed.

A question that was typically Vila – utterly pointless. Avon had no idea how he made it back to the _Liberator_ and couldn’t have cared less to know. All that mattered was that, _somehow_ , he had lived. “I don’t suppose,” he mumbled, longing for more hydration cubes, “that Blake has informed the Prince of my survival.”

Instead of the expected answering humour, Vila’s face darkened with surprising anger. “We don’t talk about that planet anymore. Not after what they tried to do to us.”

The pronoun caught Avon’s attention as he struggled into a sitting position. “ _Us_?”

Vila shrugged. “Mind you, you got the worst of it. And I suppose if they hadn’t tried to get at me, and I hadn’t found you… anyway. Didn’t expect any thanks.”

“If I knew what I was thanking you for…” Avon murmured, barely keeping up with Vila’s rambling. He still felt feeble and dizzy, sitting up had set the room spinning gently. Whatever had been in the IV – gone, now – had clearly kept him alive, but it didn’t seem to have quite eliminated the dehydration. There was a faint headache pounding behind his brow.

“Here, do you want more hydration cubes?” Vila unearthed a plate from somewhere. “Cally says you need electrodes or something.”

“Electrolytes?” Avon guess and helped himself, appalled at the tremor in his hand. “Thanks.”

“Oh, thanks after all?” Vila crowed with a smirk. “You _must_ be feeling awful.”

He was, though the slightly salty cubes helped. “I never want to go through that again,” Avon confessed quietly, almost despite himself. He had been _sure_ that he was dying. There had been nothing left, and the fact that he _had_ lived was sheer luck, nothing more. Avon didn’t like to rely on luck. “Just how long was I out?”

“Not too long. A shift, perhaps.” Vila settled back in the chair and helped himself to a cube. “I can relate, you know – that was horrible. And Gan says he couldn’t smell a thing!”

“Neither could Blake, I suspect.”

“Nor Cally! They’re all weird!”

For a moment, the image of Blake with his cutlery poised over the Dorikatl rose before Avon’s mind, and he swallowed hastily. “Perhaps we better change the topic.”

“Sorry,” Vila said, and they lapsed into silence for a while.

Avon felt better with each passing moment, slowly but surely emptying the plate of hydration cubes. He didn’t want to think about the state he’d been in when… Vila, it seemed, had found him. At least Vila didn’t seem inclined to comment on _that_ – which was just as well. If Avon owed him his life, he didn’t particularly want to ward off any potential barbs Vila might hurl his way. Better for the whole affair to be forgotten. Someone had cleaned him up, at any rate – he was dressed only in a basic robe, huddling under a blanket from the medical unit, and if the way the smell from the meal had clung to him was any indication, someone had bathed him, too. Avon breathed in deeply, delighting in the cleanliness. He wanted to go to his cabin, where he would be surrounded by nothing but his own, familiar scents, and sleep for days.

Vila, too, didn’t look exactly well, now that Avon had the attention to spare. Yes, he was in his own clothes and chipper enough, but there was a paleness about his nose and a tense set about his lips.

“Where are we, Vila?”

“Oh, going somewhere. Blake tried to find out whether there was a settlement downriver, after breaking things off with the Prince. I suspect he tried to stir up a revolution against the regime – not exactly the usual anti-Federation business, but a cause is a cause, right?”

Avon eyed the suddenly very guileless expression on the thief’s face. “You’ll have to try harder”, he told him, “if you expect me to believe you.” Frankly, it was almost a relief – they had enough lost causes already.

Vila shrugged. “Ah well, I’m not at my best. We looked, though, honest. From the _Liberator_. Couldn’t find anything. If there is a settlement downriver, or any survivors, they’re well hidden. Jenna convinced Blake to give it up, in the end, since you were… well. Nothing we could do, and now we’ve left.”

“Yes,” Avon said.

“Anyways, do you want to go to your cabin? Cally said you could, if you go straight to bed.”

“Oh, naturally.”

Walking through the familiar corridors, breathing in the familiar, unscented air, with a no less clean Vila by his side – the thief must have showered excessively, as Avon had been inclined to do after his first exposure – Avon mused at the sense of scale that came with interplanetary travel. If this had been his old life, more or less confined to Earth’s domes, a belief system of this magnitude would have been difficult to walk away from.

He wondered how Blake had ever managed.


End file.
